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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22857040">Zeitheist</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee'>Merkwerkee</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Mofield [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Masters of the Metaverse</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>more of a sidestory, s5 e1: Fish Or Cut Bait</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-02-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 18:48:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,584</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22857040</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merkwerkee/pseuds/Merkwerkee</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>When Schichael Mofield is offered a job that sounds to be good to be true, he should have known better</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Mofield [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1643155</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Zeitheist</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Scichael Mofield sat in a bar, sipping his drink.</p><p>Mofield wasn’t really his name, of course - who the hell names their kid Scichael? - but it was what the (extremely well-done) driver’s license in his pocket said and it was the name he’d given to the whispered rumors that someone wanted to hire him.</p><p>He sipped his drink and glanced up at the mirror over the sticky bar he was currently seated at. It’d been a bit of a surprise when his snitches had reported who was hiring; the guy hadn’t been seen for nearly eight months and the general assumption had been that he’d been picked up for “moving violations”. Still, it seemed either the rumors were wrong or the guy was very good at escaping; either way, he was back again and looking for Mofield’s services.</p><p>And Mofield was inclined to indulge him; his last payment had been…Unorthodox, to say the least, but oh so useful. Mofield glanced up at the mirror again, and let a muscle behind his eyes relax. Suddenly he was looking both at the mirror and through it, the rooms beyond making themselves known to his eyes in flashes of movement and light. The backroom had a mouse scurrying through it, and Scichael made a mental note not to eat any more of the pretzels. The upstairs rooms were all full, most of them with strangers seeking the short comfort that came from another’s embrace, but the room at the end had the mayor’s aide and what looked like the mayor’s wife.</p><p>Mofield smirked into his gin and let the vision fade. That was an interesting tidbit, and made coming here tonight worth it in and of itself even if the prospective client never showed. He was, after all, now almost - Scichael glanced at his watch - twenty minutes late. It wasn’t like the guy didn’t know where the place was; they’d met here the last time he’d hired Mofield, after all, and he’d been on time then.</p><p>Scichael figured it was some sort of protest about coming back to the place; the guy had looked supremely put out the last time they’d met, when he’d had great difficulty in getting his shoe off the floor thanks to a particularly venerable gum wad. Mofield had honestly called the meeting in the same place for that exact reason; he was just enough of a bastard that the petty humor amused him. Plus, of course, it was one of the few dive bars he rotated meetings between that had an intact mirror over the bar, and his contact was a creepy enough bastard when he couldn’t sneak up behind you. Mofield would probably shoot him if tried, just on reflex.</p><p>“You’re late. Thought they taught you batchies better than that,” Scichael drawled, enjoying the look of brief irritation that drifted across his contacts face as he sidled up behind Mofield. Z grimaced as he checked both the seat and the floor beneath it before deigning to sit down. Mofield hid a snicker in a sip of his drink as he enjoyed the vat-man’s discomfort; some people in the business would refuse to work for the tank-born, but Mofield contented himself with merely needling any that tried to employ him. Given his own dubious antecedents, he couldn’t <em>really </em>say he was in a position to throw stones about parents or the lack thereof.</p><p>“I had a few things that wanted doing before we met, and time got away from me,” Z responded as he sat, a creepy smile sliding onto his face as he glanced over at Mofield with an unsettling light in his eyes. Mofield raised one eyebrow, sharpening his gaze to look for oncoming police cruisers but Z merely shook his head. Mofield grunted and nodded to the bartender, who immediately refreshed his glass and set a frothing pint in front of Z. Mofield sipped politely at his glass, but Z ignored his completely in favor of staring at Mofield. Creepy batchy.</p><p>“So. I heard you were looking for me. Me, in particular,” Mofield tried the drawl again, ignoring the way the steady gaze was making his skin crawl. It was the price of doing business with the guy, and he’d never been one to shy away from a good score just because a client made him want to bathe in hand sanitizer.</p><p>“Indeed. I have need of your particular talents.” Z spoke crisply and clearly, which Scichael could appreciate in a client; it was probably a result of his batch processing. The batchy reached into a side pouch and pulled out a single sheet of lined paper that looked like it had been torn from a spiral bound. Mofield leaned over to look at it with a studied disinterest. He didn’t recognize the drawing, but he did recognize the logo and leaned back while whistling softly through his teeth.</p><p>“You’re aiming big. I don’t tend to hit developmental labs because corporate espionage isn’t really my thing, but I’ve seen their security set up.” He made it a point to keep up to date on various security initiatives and maintained no less than three clean covers to subscribe to the latest news in security both physical and cyber; the logo belonged to one of the foremost labs in the city, and he’d heard only some of the security features from a friend of a friend.</p><p>Z nodded, smile firmly fixed on his face as he leaned towards Mofield. “That’s why I need you. No-one else could even begin to attempt it.”</p><p>The admiration in the batch-born’s voice made Scichael simultaneously preen and want to go take a shower, but he concealed both reactions with the ease of long practice. No point in letting someone know when they’ve found a possible chink in your armor; they’d just slide a knife into it later when it was inconvenient. He leaned back and glanced away from Z to covertly check the room behind them in the mirror; no-one had been foolish enough to come to the bar for drinks while they’d been talking but a little extra caution never hurt anyone.</p><p>He leaned forward again to address Z. “Did you want this done fast or want this done quiet? If I need to find something similar to replace it with, I’ll need extra time for the forgery.” Swapping one item for another of considerably lesser value was an easy way to cover your tracks, but it tended to work better when he was heisting jewels than anything else; forgeries took time, especially technological ones. Paintings you could get away with some missing details, documents just needed to have the right seals, but tech forgeries needed to behave at least a little like their counterpart before they gave up or they weren’t worth using.</p><p>Z merely shook his head and patted the satchel at his side. “No need. I will provide a…replacement of sorts. I just need you to get in, get the original, leave the one I get you, and get out.” He paused for a beat. “In three days.”</p><p>“Three days!” Mofield only just stopped himself from yelling. Three days was barely enough time to case the place, let alone formulate a plan for a heist. Granted, he didn’t need to do any digging at City Hall for floor plans anymore thanks to Z’s last payment, but even considering that this was a bit much. Still, Z’s last payment had been good, had pushed him to the very top of his game, and he could admit to himself that his greedy, blackened soul was drooling over what else he could get from the batch-born.</p><p>He leaned back on his stool. “And what do I get in return?” He knew he sounded bored, but Z’s grin only widened, damn the batchy. Reaching into his satchel, Z brought out a small rod  approximately eight inches long and two in diameter. Inset into the surface were symbols Mofield was somehow certain weren’t part of any human language, set on rings that rotated and shifted under Z’s clever fingers. Mofield feigned disinterest as best he could. “My niece has one of those. Does it make the pretty light show when you shine a flashlight through it too?” he sneered, but Z’s expression didn’t waver.</p><p>“This,” he said, enunciating clearly but quietly as he held the rod up to what little light was available in the dingy bar, “is a dimensional hopper. You set the rings to the dimension you want to go and press the button on the end.” Mofield’s eyebrows crawled towards his hairline. “That simple?” The other more…<em>regulated </em>travel facilitators were never that easy. “That simple,” Z confirmed, and banished the rod back to his satchel with a quick flick of clever fingers. “It is also, of course, enormously illegal to make or own one, but I don’t think you care very much about that, do you, Mr. Mofield?” Mofield snorted a mirthless laugh, and Z nodded genially.</p><p>“So, Mr. Mofield, what do you say?” Z held out his hand. Mofield hesitated; his instincts were screaming at him that something wasn’t right with the clone in front of him, but……He’d always been greedy, and he loved the thrill of a challenge.</p><p>Scichael reached out and took the extended hand. “A pleasure doing business with you, as always.”<br/>———————————————————————————————————–</p><p>
  <em>“You in, partner?”</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“You know me, partner. I’m always in.”</em>
</p><p>———————————————————————————————————–<br/>Sirens wailed as Scichael hauled his nearly-unconscious partner along the inside of the chain-link fence towards the hole he’d made in it earlier, cursing himself for going along with this and that bastard Z for putting him up to it.</p><p>Mofield’s long-time partner, Lyndon Burrnow, made a bubbly noise as more blood flowed down his chest. He’d taken a bullet meant for Mofield, and from the sound of it the damn thing had nicked a lung. He needed to get his partner to the hospital now or he wouldn’t have a partner much longer.</p><p>“Hang in there Lynd, I gotcha,” he chanted as he finally made it to the hole in the fence. The whole venture had been snake-bit from the start; he’d spent a day driving by in various cars casing the place with his extra vision and the sheer number of sensors, security points, and vaults in the place had made it clear subtlety wasn’t going to be an option. Any kind of covert infiltration would take at least two people on the inside, and a quick check of the application process made it clear that turning anyone already on payroll would take months he didn’t have, and getting someone on the payroll from outside would take even longer.</p><p>So he’d chosen a more direct route, paying a hacker out of his own funds to cut power and communication to the site so he and Lynd could come in through an industrial ventilation shaft without being cooked to death or alerting anyone and hitting a lab a floor away from the real target. They’d clean out that lab, he’d slip over and replace the bit Z wanted with the forged piece, and they’d be out through the maintenance tunnels after setting off a fire alarm.</p><p>That plan had lasted all the way up to actually getting to the lab they were going to clear out. Almost immediately they’d been set upon by a guard whose glowing, bulging veins were a big clue that he wasn’t the average no-neck goon. Scichael <em>hated </em>hitting places that employed pilots. Still, Lynd - who loved a good fight the way other men loved a good beer - had simply tackled the glowing bastard with a gleeful yell to Mofield to get on with it.</p><p>He’d taken off and left Lynd rolling on the floor with glowing-veins, switching the piece Z’d asked for and hurrying back. When he got back Lynd was sporting one hell of a shiner and the glowing bastard - who glowed quite a bit less now - was out cold on the floor. They’d gone in to their original target to start clearing it of anything that looked both valuable and portable, and found three more guards that were very clearly the result of some kind of experiments, plus another smug-looking pilot holding their less than metaphorical leashes.</p><p>Mofield had snatched some kind of blue, glowing device off a nearby table and they’d both legged it, but the alarm had been well and truly raised. Armies of guards had come boiling out of the woodwork - fortunately of the more typical gun-wielding variety - and had cut them off at every turn. Lynd had finally ended up tackling one to the ground taking his gun to cover Mofield as Scichael worked frantically to unlock a side door they’d managed to find. Lynd had been shot just as they got the door open, and Mofield was left to keep him mostly upright and going for their exit strategy.</p><p>Fortunately, the hole in the fence was still there - the hacker had been worth every penny Scichael’d spent on him and had thoughtfully disabled the perimeter alarms as well as communications - and he managed to manhandle his partner through. Less pleasing was the canned bastard leaning against their getaway car, the drive system of which had clearly been ruined beyond repair.</p><p>Mofield scowled at the smiling face of Z. “The hell are you doing here? I need to get Lynd to the hospital, he’s been shot,” a panicked glance told him that yes, Lynd was still with him though he was fading fast. Z didn’t move. “Did you get what I asked for?” Shouting was becoming audible in the distance and Mofield grimaced. “Yes, now get out of my way! I need to get another car, Lynd’s <em>shot</em>, do you hear me?”</p><p>“Let me see it,” Z said calmly, taking a step forward. The shouting behind them was getting louder and Scichael scrabbled madly for the satchel at his side before throwing the whole thing at Z. Z caught it, and looked inside for a long moment before smiling even wider. “Excellent! And as promised,” he tossed the rod that landed near Mofield’s feet. “The dimensional hopper. If you set it right, your friend might even live; there are a lot of technologically advanced alternate dimensions where you two aren’t fugitives from the law that could have him back on his feet in a matter of days.” So saying he began walking off, heedless of Mofield’s sudden scrabbled for the hopper.</p><p>“What’s the setting? YOU BASTARD! <b>WHAT SETTINGS?</b>” The batched bastard ignored Scichael’s screams as he disappeared around the corner. Mofield threw one panicked look over his shoulder at the guards now clearly visible through the fence and headed his way before grabbing Lyndon and pressing the button. With a soft pop, both he and Lyndon disappeared from reality just as the first wave of guards pushed through the hole in the fence and fetched up against the stationary vehicle that no longer sheltered two wanted felons.<br/>———————————————————————————————————–</p><p>
  <em>A man stands at the top of a hill covered in delicate aqua grass that slopes softly to a white-sand beach and a light periwinkle ocean. In front of him is a raised mound of ocher dirt topped by a rock that has a name carved deep into it: LYNDON BURRNOW.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>The man looks up at the achingly blue sky for a long moment before speaking to the grave.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>“I’ll get him for you, partner. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll kill Z.”</em>
</p>
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